The Wandering Village

The Wandering Village was quite an interesting and unique take on the city builder genre. It’s a pretty standard, safe city builder type game but a few of the points of note: The game has good music and sound effects with a fairly easy control scheme to wrap your head around. Most of the game has a really nice painterly art style but with a really odd choice to make the villagers in a completely different art style that kinda clashes with the rest of the game. Not enough to detract from the game but certainly noticeable next to all the other pretty art. I only played the story mode which was not particularly difficult; so long as you are paying attention and not blasting through the game at 4x speed all the time, it would be pretty difficult to lose. The story is nice set dressing for the game though some of the narrative choices feel rushed/unearned. The ending was pretty epic though, very fulfilling. Game-play wise, if you like city builders, this will probably be a win for you. Similar in feel to Frostpunk where you’re regularly making choices to counter environmental hazards with the added cherry of being able to pick the sorts of hazards you’ll need to face from time to time. The Onbu (the big city-bearing creature) is quite lovable and you get to choose [spoiler]between the path of nurture or control[/spoiler] and they feel equally satisfying. I would have liked a more direct indication of [spoiler]trust level[/spoiler]. I know there’s an animation difference but you’d only know it directly correlates by finding the information outside of the game. Something as simple as [spoiler]trust level[/spoiler] low, neutral, high when hovering over the portrait would have gone a long way for me. The game gives you lots of information to help you make decisions though I will say the one piece of info I was constantly wishing for was being able to see what was consuming resources. Often times I would get critically low on a resource and just have to click around my entire town trying to find that one building I set to make X with Y an hour ago cause I needed 10 of that item and I now have 130 X with no Y left. Overall, very much enjoyed. Returned to the game post-credits to do some of the achievements and try out a couple of the paths I didn’t really touch during the normal playthrough. 30 hours of enjoyment and can very much recommend :)

I do think it gets a bit busy, but I like it. I did not finish my 1st run, after a long time between playing I restarted the run for a fresh start and I have been enjoying it even more now. I have been learning to use the game to its potential this time around, too. xD Controller feel pretty good to use as well. Onbu is so very cute, yes.

Always wanted a city building management game with a bit of survival. This game fulfill it all! Its not just about building...you gotta do a lot of preparation for the next biome n different conditions that may affect the survivability of your village. Cozy music and nature ambience. Couldnt stop playing from the start. I love my onbu and my villagers.